Why Video Game Movies Still Aren't Cutting It

Another video game movie comes out, Need For Speed, and guess what? It got tepid reviews and box office. It’s sad to say this is no big news flash, and we’re probably still a few years away from the video game movie that could finally turn things around.

Another given when a video game movie flops is there’s going to be pundits trying to figure out why this one didn’t make it. It’s actually not too hard to get to the bottom of this, but Vulture brought up a few good points we hadn’t considered before.

First point, there’s too many politics between the studios and the game companies. Case in point, Sam Raimi wanted to do another script when he was going to direct World of Warcraft, then realized Blizzard had veto power over everything. There were also political problems between Universal and Microsoft when trying to get a Halo movie off the ground.

Another problem is by the time a game movie comes out, the game is already yesterday’s news. As Vulture points out, “Need For Speed wasn’t greenlit because its game series was hotter than ever – sales have been declining for years, in fact – but instead because it would make for a low-cost Fast and Furious knockoff.”

Yet another problem is that movies are getting closer to games, and as Vulture wrote, “After you play a heavily cinematic game like The Last of Us or Mass Effect, you might wonder whether a movie is ultimately superfluous.”

Again, we’re hoping that Warcraft could be the game changer for gaming movies, and we feel it could translate very well to the big screen in the right hands. We’ll of course have to wait until 2016 to see if this will happen, but we hope that director Duncan Jones and his team will take his time to get it right.